Margaret Renkl (born October 1961) is an American writer and contributing opinion writer for the New York Times who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, and two other books. Her weekly opinion columns focus on nature, politics, and culture.
Margaret Renkl | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1961 (age 63–64) Andalusia, Alabama, U.S. |
| Education | Auburn University (BA) University of South Carolina (MA) |
| Employer | The New York Times |
| Spouse | Haywood Moxley |
| Children | 3 |
Early life and education
Renkl was born in Andalusia, Alabama, and moved with her family to Birmingham, Alabama as a child. Renkl spent much of her childhood out-of-doors, with frequent visits to her maternal grandparents, who remained in Lower Alabama.
Renkl's mother was descended from peanut farmers, and her father was an apartment complex developer.[1] Renkl, who attended Auburn University, described herself as an eager and enthusiastic undergraduate student who "wanted to learn everything, read everything, think about everything." While a student, she was involved in running a literary magazine, and upon graduation,[2] was accepted into a literature PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania.[3] Renkl, who had never traveled farther north than Tennessee, found the northern climate inhospitable. The doctoral program, with its focus on critical theory, was a poor fit for her poetic aspirations.[4] Renkl returned south after one semester, and later obtained a master's degree from a graduate writing program at the University of South Carolina.[1]
Career
Renkl taught high school English at Harpeth Hall, a private school in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1987 to 1997.[5] She quit teaching after a difficult pregnancy with her second child, and spent years freelance writing for various publications,[1] including Glamour, Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, and River Teeth.[6] In October 2009, Renkl founded Chapter16, an online literary magazine featuring Tennessee and Tennessee-adjacent writers.[7] She stepped down as founding editor after ten years.[8] Renkl's work began appearing in The New York Times in 2015, with an essay focusing on caregiving for elderly relatives.[9] Soon after, she was offered a weekly column, writing early pieces on the backyard drama of nesting birds[10] and the way the 2016 United States presidential election played out in her local neighborhood.[11] Renkl devoted fifteen years to writing poetry, but eventually focused more on prose after concluding that poetry would "require an intensity and concentration that ultimately I just don’t have."[12]
Late Migrations
The raw material for Renkl's 2019 nonfiction book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, arose from a weekly blog she began as she and her husband dealt with caring for Renkl's parents and mother-in-law. The book interweaves short pieces on nature and the natural world with family stories and memories from Renkl's life. Renkl had not planned to turn the material into a book, considering the blog a way to process her grief. "I found that I took a lot of comfort from watching the natural cycles in my yard. I didn't actually start writing the nature essays until a few months later, when the primary season for the 2018 election really started gearing up. And all this ugliness was coming out."[13] The book, which includes artwork by Renkl's brother, Billy Renkl,[1] received generally favorable reviews,[14][15][16][17] though some critics found the book hard to characterize.[18][19]
Influences
While Renkl's formal education was mainly focused around poetry, she eventually settled on her current prose style, including some notably short micro-essays. Renkl names E.B. White, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and James Agee among the writers who have influenced her work.[20] In Death of a Cat, Renkl explicitly links an existential understanding of the animal world to E.B. White's Death of a Pig.[21] Danny Heitman of The Wall Street Journal noted that Renkl's nature writing "seems like a belated answer to White."[19] Renkl's nature writing has been compared to naturalist writers such as Annie Dillard and Peter Matthiessen.[22] Late Migrations was selected for Jenna Bush Hager's book club; Hager compared it to writing by Mary Oliver.[23]
The South
Renkl is influenced by her upbringing and life in the American South. In her opinion essay "What is a Southern Writer?" Renkl grapples with the region's meaning, both in her work and for the canon as a whole, writing:
People can hardly help loving the hands that rocked their cradles or the landscapes that shaped their souls, but I doubt there’s a single writer in the South for whom life here isn’t a source of deep ambivalence. And yet all the writers I’ve mentioned had opportunities to leave—many actually did leave for a time before returning to stay. It has all made me wonder: What if being a Southern writer has nothing to do with rural tropes or lyrical prose or a lush landscape or humid heat so thick it’s hard to breathe? What if being a Southern writer is foremost a matter of growing up in a deeply troubled place and yet finding it somehow impossible to leave? Of seeing clearly the failings of home and nevertheless refusing to flee?[24]
Personal life
Renkl is married to Haywood Moxley, a writer and English teacher. They have three adult sons.[25]
Bibliography
Poetry
- The Marigold poems. Galloway Township, NJ: Still Waters Press. 1993.
Essays
- Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Minneapolis, MN, USA: Milkweed Editions. 2019-07-09.
- Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South. Minneapolis, MN, USA: Milkweed Editions. 2021-09-14.
- The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. Minneapolis, MN, USA: Spiegel & Grau LLC. 2023-10-24.
References
External links
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